Much Wanted
by pygmalion
Summary: After giving his son, Connor, the life that the boy deserves, Angel comes to grips with what the Hell he just did. Then, he naturally -- tries to fix it. ! Spoilers, profanity, alternative ending; biiig chapter 2 added.
1. this is a rubbish of human rind

**Warnings:** Spoilers for _Angel_, manipulation of plotholes, and profanity. 

**Much Wanted**   
Chapter 1: _this is a rubbish of human rind_

    Blue eyes are derived from a recessive gene. Darla would have had two, and the kid must be only a carrier since his eyes are brown. Blond hair is recessive too. Darla was blond. Angel comes from a family of dedicated brunettes. So... that means the boy is a recessive blond, an expressive brunette. Skin. There are many melanins for skin pigment; the more you inherit, the darker you are. 

    _Physically_, Angel reminds himself. 

    He casts his eyes over to the photograph reposing precariously against his pen holder. There is a boy with dark hair and long white hands, red lips flared into a sneer and narrowed eyes wary and distant, indefinitely blue. This is the only photograph of his son in existence, as far as he knows. The identical boy that smiles from the glossy pages of yearbooks and the foregrounds of family portraits, in somebody else's home, is somebody else's child. 

    Shit. What is he doing? Since when were genetics relevant to creating life out of vampirism, and -- and... 

    _Darla's hands. Darla's lips. My strength. My soul._

    The pen snaps in Angel's big white hand, inky trails clasping his knuckles and twining sloppily down his wrist. There is now an enormous black starburst growing off-center on his page of meticulously diagramed Punnett squares, radiating wetly onto the table surface, rippling off the table's edge, obliterating carefully printed genetic terms and BBs and Bbs and YyBbs and -- and damn, his shirt was _not_ cheap. 

    "Hey Angel food," Lorne says, shutting the door behind him. Spinning back around, he sees the mess and dismay asserts itself on the demons' green face, an 'o' forming between his lips: "Ooh. Sorry about that." 

    Angel crushes the dripping paper between his hands and throws it into the gleaming, industrial strength waste disposal unit, broken pen fragments clattering away shortly after. "Ahh," he waves one big, black hand cautiously, avoiding spattering his shiny new office with residue. "Don't worry about it." With the still-clean pinkie and ring finger of his other hand, he surreptitiously grabs the photograph, slots it into his breast pocket while Lorne is still distractedly roving the room in vain for tissue paper. "It wasn't you." 

    In fact, he hadn't even noticed Lorne trotting in at all. CEO lifestyle is beginning to tell on him: he's getting sloppy. "We get a call?" Angel inquires on reflex, before remembering that news like _that_ would come in a manila folder, delivered by infernal hand. Invisible. _Invisible_ infernal hand, that is. 

    "Not just so, peanut!" Making sure that Angel is still listening, black brow craned and swivelling on his abundantly voluptuous and equally annoying swivelly-chair, Lorne then continues: "Considering that we now have a multi-billion dollar operation full of, ya know, myriad stafflings and their _eyes_ and their _ears_ and their big guns and mass-produced stakes and stuff at our disposal, the gang and I have decided that you could use a little --" 

    "Not interested." Finger points, freezes Lorne's fish-gasp facial expression before a single word can escape the demon's opening mouth: "Not brooding." 

    New fish-gasp, "B--!" 

    "Executive decision," Angel says, nodding in agreement to his black hands laced together in front of him. Still swiveling too, of course. 

    Lorne windmills his arms, a frown creasing his horned brow. "I... we don't get it. Look, Angel sweets," he says, ignoring the obvious fact that Angel is steeling himself against a sympathetic flood, "we're all worried about you. Even Gunn, and you know how he's been all [movie] recently. You have no play. No work -- assuming you differentiate. You've occulted yourself in the wuthering heights of the shimmering two-hundredth executive floor of W&H and the people who saved the world with you a--" 

    "Don't understand." 

    "Bluhh! Yeah!" With his hands, Lorne describes an arrowhead that ends at Angel. "It doesn't take extrasensory perception to tell that something's smoking your fish. You just sit up here drawing boxes all day. And night." 

    Smoking his what? "Smo -- look," Angel says, stopping his endless abortive rotations to straighten up in his seat. "Lorne. If there's something you can do, I'll tell you. And if there's something _I_ can do for..." He pauses, has an epiphany, squinches one eye shut across the room at Lorne. "--unless there _is_ something? Did someth--?" 

    "No," his friend cuts him off, crestfallen as he shakes his head. "We're fine. Come on. Is it Cordelia? We all know how hard this has been. Jasmine. The endless sea of love and world domination... Ever since Cordy popped out that mysterious bastard goddess and you were forced to kill h... Angel?" 

    Angel's in his own little world. "Hmm?" 

    Lorne stares at him. 

    Memory is such a frail thing, soft and weak, warm and alive with a quiddity that is as easily killed as puppy's breath. If not killed, then mutilated, bones ground and flesh reworked into new seams, to create something not entirely different but not at all the same. Perhaps Angel should be regretting what he had done to his friends. _Who's Connor?_ he still remembers Fred asking, ringing out dimly behind him beneath the chatter of a hundred shoes in the marble gut of the Lobby. Perhaps Angel should be back in the century-old act of contemplating his own hypocrisy, the hypocrisy of telling _them_ that they would be corrupted by dawn. Perhaps he should be asking himself whether he saved the world or damned it. 

    But no. Angel is wondering. _Is that my boy?_ Soft and weak, warm and alive, malleable. As if the boy was sprung from the same clay that humans -- which his son is so like, and not at all -- supposedly were; remoulded at Angel's unilateral command, as mankind had supposedly been from the fingers of an ambiguous Creator? Nothing but a memory? 

    Does Angel have any right to make him so? 

    _Sacrifices have to be made_, Jasmine reminded him. Memory. _I would have given them everything they could not attain for thems--_

    "I'm sorry, Lorne," Angel says as he stares at the woody silhouette that the paper left on his desk, a letter-sized window slowly being swallowed by ink that flows faster than it dries. 

    The demon pauses by the door, his suit fireball-purple relief against the dour sophistication of the office. "It's okay," he says, then goes away. 

    Angel's finger collides with the comm-system panel before he remembers where the call button is. He finds it soon enough, his other hand drumming slim, ebon fingers against the smearing ink spilled on his table. "Lilah," he says, "I--" 

    "Got it," the syllables roll over the speakers like a fat kitten. "the cleaning personnel will be right up." 

    "--want to talk to him." Angel wishes someone would turn the sunset off, necro-plastic windows withstanding. Curtains drawn, his office is lit up, orb like fire, sky like Hell. He's used to being in the dark, damn it. "I think I may have made a terrible mistake." 

    "Annnd the Heroic Cycle starts," Lilah's voice replies, tone incurably ironic, abrasively amused. "Nadir's a long way down." 

    "Just get me a num--" 

    His fax machine wheezes, smooth paper unscrolling from its flat mouth. 

    "You're pushing the envelope, Angel. I've got to warn you. Everyone understands the occasional compromise, but the senior partners are only going to bend over backward so many times for you." 

    "The senior partners can lick my sack," is out of his mouth before he can stop himself, knuckles glowing white and rigid as he grips the armrest of his chair. He reaches out with the other hand, snatches the pooling sheets up with his other hand and rips it out of the slot before the machine finishes severing. 

    Lilah tsks across the wires, filling his desk space with playful, sibilant clicks. "Temper, temper. Fine. Disregard the bad guys if you want to, Angel, just remember what's important to you. Connor has a funny aptitude for breaking free of the magic that binds him. What's a memory spell compared to Quor-toth?" Distractedly skimming the communication controls with his fingers, Angel can't find the off button fast enough; his eyes are glued to the paper, insensitive to the curdling irritation of blood red sunset outside and the dead girl's voice in his office. Lilah sounds like she's quoting a movie. "Stay sharp, hero. The night is young." 

* * *

**Author's Notes:** R&R is muchly appreciated. I haven't written in this... 'style' in a very long time, and I'd never experimented with _Angel_ or _Angel_ fanfiction before I heard Vincent Kartheiser stepped in and rabidly KaZaAed all of his episodes. 

    My reason for writing this fanfiction (other than the fact that I'm a fledgling writer with the regular impulses of rabid fangirls and a penchant for abusing my freedom of speech), is because I like Connor. Well, I liked him a lot when he first showed up in the series, all animal skins, dark humor and feral ass-kicking and interesting connections with daddy, then I started disliking him intensely along with Cordelia when the repetitive angst and (quasi?) pedophiliac fucking occurred, then he killed Jasmine (whom I found boring) and I just fell in love, totally. 

    Then Joss Whedon bastardized him again. I don't like the ending of that story arc, and I really hope the series gets more of our little Destroyer. Therefore, I'm writing and posting my alternative continuation based on various plot holes I spotted and how much reading and reviewing I get. 


	2. this is a girl who died in her mind

**FYI:** Connor POV, gappy stream-of-consciousness-ish. _[overwritten memory fragments]_ formatted like so. I'm afraid that I hadn't done too much beta-ing for this one, although I went over it a few times. Feel free to shout about errors. 

  
  


**Much Wanted**  
Chapter 2: _this is a girl who died in her mind_

    Connor loves Tracy. 

    _[--and Connor loves Cordelia but--]_

    Wait. What? 

    Startled, he glances over his shoulder, instinctively looking for whoever -- _what_ever echoed his thoughts just then but that brief flare of curiosity shorts out in an instant, overwhelmed by the urgency of the present. _Shit, shit shit._ He lifts his hands from the steering wheel and buries his pale face in his palms, not a single thought given to the various dangers of doing such things in the midst of moving traffic because _the traffic isn't moving_. He hates traffic. It makes him want to bust out and run over metal roofs, clear the cluster as if the vehicles were no more than cobbles under his skimming feet, fly far, far away. 

    Most of the time, he doesn't have to worry about big city problems like those in a small town like this. There's never traffic in this sunny little town marooned in the virescent jumble of trees and yellow roads, _except somehow, today there is_. His life had been normal up until now, a safe, domestic affair conducted flawlessly according to the ethos of happy family television. Impossible traffic jams, terrible accidents befalling female friends, it would have driven anyone as unfamiliar with such things to one Hell of a breakdown, _writhing_ on one's butt with impatience, fear, grief -- things that, Tracy would have fondly said, _make him human_. 

    Except -- inexplicably -- they don't. Even in this state of emergency, Connor doesn't curse, he _doesn't_ writhe or fidget no matter how much some more normal part of him wants to, his lean, loosely-clad body tapers motionlessly over the ergonomic contours of the automobile's leather seat, relaxed yet ready, the automatic preservation of fuel for torrents of either action or emotion. Even the exhausted fly trapped in the back of the car senses his agitation, empathizes, redoubling its clicking, buzzing efforts against the window glass. Nervous kinetic energy, despite temporary suspension, radiates palpably along every fibre and muscle and bone in Connor's body, blistering and crackling like static in electric blue irises, hackles, his unbrushed hair. 

    He gives the traffic jam five minutes, before cool, logical deduction leads him to an equally logical conclusion: _"Fuck this."_

    Connor opens the car door and slips out, with the eerie grace of some fucked up ghostly thing (which he doesn't believe in. Ghosts, that is.), face white as bone, heartbeat tolling with more of the morbid regularity of a church bell than a fleshy organ. His hair flips like something tragically poetic, according to his brain, which temporarily disassociated itself from the rest of his body and soul for sanity's sake. He crosses half the town and closes in on his school on foot, making good time -- even for himself -- despite the unprecented bustle of road action, with the same predatory efficiency that his little sister does on unguarded Pop Tarts. 

    The first thing he sees is an ambulance, flashing, red, white and blue beneath the ripple of his _[--their--?]_ nation's flag. 

    He plows through the crowded street, sends small children tumbling aside like upset china. 

    By the time a police officer manages to get some sort of grip on him, Connor has broken well into the cordoned-off perimeter, wearing torn yellow tape around his waist and an unusual amount of clear saline fluid on his face. He carefully reminds himself not to break anyone, and then promptly grabs the officer by the shirt. 

    A hundred pounds heavier and two chins greater, the officer in question gets his head yanked down by a dainty, girl-wristed hand. The older man proceeds to look distinctly put upon, not afraid -- yet. Surprise takes a few milliseconds to kick in. Good for him. 

    "WHAT THE _FUCK_ HAPPENED?!" Connor yells. 

    "Are you a family mem--" 

    "I'm her boyfriend," Connor seethes, conveniently forgetting the last conversation he'd had with Tracy just a few days before. 'It's not you, it's me.' 

    Connor's mind skips backwar-- 

    _[--to a bed, a low roof, a makeshift home and a slender, brown-skinned body silken and voluptuous in his arms and legs. "We can'd do this again." A woman's voice. _

    "Why not?" His voice. 

    "Because you're Angel's s--"] 

    "--Ohhhh," the officer says. 

    Connor startles, again, finds that sympathy tamed the neon pink conflagration that had roared up behind the meaty panels of the older man's face, his humiliation dying under the weight of one meaningless, overextended syllable. No doubt, the kid's... remarkable strength -- or rather, the older man's inability to extricate himself from the kid -- is being attributed to angsty romantic zeal. Temporary adrenaline rush. Oh yes, poor kid. "It looks like suicide," the officer says, then adds, sincerely, "I'm sorry." 

    The shirt collar slips out of Connor's fingers. 

    Time slows down; fearful parents and inquisitive children, sirens and meaty policemen, fade from the foreground into the background. 

    Where does his mind go at times like these? 

    Soft, wrinkled hands perfumed with soap abruptly close on Connor's cheeks. Lovingly. He feels the cold sickle of his mother's _[--fangs--?]_ bracelet against his flushed ear. Turning around to face her is a slow, ponderous process, the revolution of a planet, heavy with the leaden sorrow in his belly. She and Dad had never approved of his relationship with Tracy, but they never, ever would have wished this upon her. Now, her eyes are pink and wet with the meltwater of human _[--alien--]_ decency. 

    "I'm so sorry," his mother tells him, and pulls him into her arms. 

    He makes an effort to hug her back, stiff and awkward like a walking dead person. See, Connor doesn't want to be held, he doesn't want a shoulder to cry on, he doesn't want to know what _I'm sorry, it looks like_. 

    "I want to see the body." 

    Just to _see_ it. What Connor doesn't _know_, or want to know, is how remarkably sharply pale his eyes are, under the slow evaporation of spent tears; hardly aware even that the tears stopped flowing, he doesn't want to know why he wouldn't be able to bring them back at his ex-girlfriend's funeral. [Ears, souveniers per each of hundreds of other lives lost, so what's one more?] He would prefer the concrete existence of Tracy's body to the vast and precarious implications of the knowledge that she had cursed his name in a broken monster's voice during the last seconds of her life. 

    His mother is shocked, but she can't _really_ be surprised. "_Connor_..." Defeat. 

    In the course of his young life under her care, the frail embraces and propriety of humanity have never held sway over the direction of Connor's thinking. Sometimes, he frightened his father with the calculating detachment with which he did simple things, from poisoning rats for his mother to studying psychology, peeling back the metaphorical layers of people-souls in search of something else. Sometimes, he breaks his mother's heart, remote in her fingertips and his privatized miseries. She's a homely woman, who loves to share both knowledge and comfort; a great believer in mankind. 

    _["Then I'm a demon." _

    "No, no, my dear boy." Holtz always seemed so certain, but now he looked... old, as well. "God, I wish I knew what you are."] 

    Tracy's father lets him through. Over the telephone, that is. The obscenely wealthy man has not left his engagements in Los Angeles for quite some time, according to Tracy and the slew of servants who have cared for her since birth. Gratefulness tempers the old self-righteous rage that Connor has always felt on his ex-girlfriend's behalf: every child needs a father. 

    _[Even the offspring of two demons.]_

    --despite Dad's joking insistence to the contrary when he finds Connor correcting mathematical errors in the older man's accounting papers. 

    "Please don't go," his mother says. 

    "I have to, Mom." No, he _should have_ been able to _save her_. 

    _[--and she should have been able to save him.]_

    He _should have_ been there for her. 

    _["You told me you'd always be here for me, Cordy, where are you now?"]_

    Long frame contracted into a white-faced ball in the chilly recess of a corner of the ambulance, Connor momentarily wonders who the shit he's thinking about. _Stop it_, he tells himself, promptly focuses on the present with a jungle cat's hair-raising intensity. 

    Tracy's chest balloons out beneath two heavy gray slabs of electronics which look more like they might crush the last vestiges of life out of her crumpled body than jolt it back to animation. Still, the two hospital attendants seem to know what they're doing. For the msot part, they ignore him; at least, after the first four times he asked -- _told_ them to _SHUT THE FUCK UP AND DO YOUR JOB_. 

    They didn't waste time on pity. 

    Tracy always is _[--was --_ no, stop it_--]_ a headcase. Even Connor's mother, one of the most forgiving teacher to preside over the school's kindergarten department, thought Tracy's obsession with the occult and sundry other dark, revolting things difficult to tolerate. When she'd been a toddler, there had been excessive usage of black crayons occasionally rosetted with carmine and stories of her father, who apparently resided in an alternate dimension wherefrom he puppeted life on Earth using the shiny chrome and "necroplastic" veneer of a law firm; and there had been, of course, the day when she had come to class with an inverted cross etched into her left palm with her new compass. While most of the moments in Connor's early memory are fuzzy at best (or at worst, wobble in strange, misfitting duplicity), moments with Tracy had a magical clarity about them. 

    When they had first met, in second grade, Tracy Hart had told Connor that she would change his life. She had not counted on him changing hers. 

    Some lower part of his conscious, less embroiled in anxiety and nostalgia, watches the yellow roads and dusty chaparral climes segue into a more urban setting. A loud _click-thump_ of hospital workers unlocking the ambulance doors is enough to send the separate parts of Connor's mind into a dazing convergence, confusing at first, but it sorts itself out. 

    He doesn't even have to look; he _knows_. 

    "She's dead," he tells the workers softly. 

    One woman hesitates; a few brows flatten, but they motion at him still. "Come down, sir." 

    Defeat. 

    He begins to climb out in the wake of the stretcher, when something small happens, a wheel or something hollow snaps or breaks loose from beneath the corpse -- _boom_ -- and above the buckling steel and leather and panicky medical personnel, Tracy's slender, bruise-black arms come up as if in unholy worship. _Familiar, so famil --_ abruptly, Connor's vision divides, a black spike winding into the center of perception and ripping a tunnel through space, but for once, not through time. 

    A moment of lucidity: _I'm just hallucinating_. Lucidity shatters like dropped glass when he glimpses something just outside the growing darkness in his eyes and he feels _hope_, pernicious and painful: 

    Tracy's crazy green eyes were open for an instant. 

    Then a hole yawns up where her eyes, nose, mouth were, and Connor sees someone else, _darker-skinned, darker-haired, fuller-lipped and more classically beautiful, eyes glistening like liquid pitch and sightless from pain and her mouth flies open, screaming, screaming as if something is pulling itself out of the fetters of her flesh, and even though it's not part of her she'll be gone in some vague but irrecoverable way when it's leaves her -- screaming, screaming, as if she's going to die._

    _[But last time, at least she didn't _die_.]_

    Who? Connor wonders, desperately, _who?!_ before his senses are swamped by the same powerful force as before. 

    _"Connor," oh but she's bleeding, belly no more than an oozing gash, exhausted but indescribably beautiful and wild, and the people in white coats who had been detachedly crouched over her nails and hair with beauty products while she slept, peacefully comatose, are now unconscious on the floor with bruises darkening on their temples. "Connor, honey, it's happening again," Cordelia moans, faintly, fainter and fainter. "You have to -- stop him." Her eyes fall shut, her head to the side, an eerily familiar stillness overtaking her damaged body._

    Stop wh--?! 

    _[--sword swinging, jacket as black as two hundred years of undead history, such an ironic contrast to his (their) skin and the twisted nobility of his (their) intentions--]_

    "No! _Angel!_" he shouts. "Stop him!" 

    Someone in the throng of blue nurse uniforms straightens and sets themself apart. "What?!" They look around, "Who?!" 

    He tears forward, hair flying and teeth bared, looking every which way. The guy's about to murder a baby, _his_ baby, _who do they think?!_ "God damn you _morons_, I mean--!" 

    _[-- Angel, because it's always Angel's fault, except the Devil shows such pretty colors and Angel's all monochrome and wears his sins out there on his (beast) face, so maybe just this once --]_

    Connor stops himself running and speaking both, long white fingers wrapping around his mouth. _Familiar_, it's all so familiar, and yet incongrous with the world he sees, concrete under his feet, light over his head. Metallic blood slides down his throat; his own, he reminds himself. _Just his blood_. He bit his tongue, that's all. And yet, Connor then finds himself flattening an arm over his own chest, as if to disguise a smear and torn shirt from unknowing eyes, and floating strains of some exotic, herbal perfume tantalizes him from the deeper parts of memory, warm and feminine, perhaps something his mother wore. Names elude his grasp. Java? Juniper? _[--Jasm --]_

    "Sorry," he mumbles, "I'm... having a moment." 

    That one attendant strides over to him as the rest of the rabble gets Tracy's body moving again. "Who was that?" kind tone, pleasant girl-voice, a look of empathy and concern. 

    "Oh, you know," such a headache, spots dancing in his eyes, "just a religious thing." 

    "Of course. I didn't mean that." _--because it wasn't really Angel's f--_ oh, Hell, he's never had a headache like this before. The well-meaning samaritan doesn't let up though. It'd be tempting to put her out of her misery. "Who's Cordy?" 

    "Oh, her." Connor begins -- and as if from a nightmare finally, truly realized, he feels a terrible, penetrating truth in his own words: "Another person who died." 

  


  


  
**Author's Notes:** Aiieee, I'm so sorry this took so long! Senior year just started and I have a lot of GPA points to pull myself up to. But, I swear, I _will_ finish this fic. For Connor. For Angel. For even stupid Jasmine and Cordelia. _For the fandom_. Suffer me convoluted plot. 

    If you want more, or more in less extensive chapters, or more in any form whatsoever, please do toss me a review. It's great incentive to actually get things down on the computer, since I've already got my fairytale in my head. 


End file.
